[godsteknon]

Please forgive my ignorance, but I need help! My husband and I bought an iMac in 2002 (the dome one). We ignorantly felt like we had sufficient hardware to do all that we would want to eventually do on our mac--we thought we just needed to purchase the software: Photoshop CS and Final Cut Express HD. We did know that we had to upgrade our RAM, so we just bought enough RAM to max us out as we were told at 1G. We purchased the programs and find that we now have a hard drive issue. We don't have enough hard drive space to accommodate the Final Cut Express and our other applications. How do we solve this seemingly never ending spending spree?

[Luisc]

You could buy an external drive. The Lacie Hard Drives are pretty good

http://www.lacie.com/

[robby818]

The iMac is a great little machine for some light duty video editing-- imovie 20-30 min dvds. I had a 15" imac for a year and did some video editing using a firewire drive. yes it worked but firewire at times did get overinundated esp when dealing with video. i had problems daisychaining firewire devices. if i rem correctly i had the best experience when i imported dv to the internal hard drive and then exported from imovie to my firewire drive.

I have seen reports where people have upgraded the internal hard drive. you could pay an apple dealer to do that for you but...

It sounds like you need to move to a powermac. i know you want to save money, and buying a new system is just the opposite but in the long run i think a powermac would be a much better fit for your needs. if you are working with video, internal ide or sata drives are hard to beat bec they are fast, cheap, and offer lots of storage. You will get such a big boost in performance by going with a dual g5 configuaration that the diff is like night and day. apple is selling refurb'd dual 1.8s for $1699. sell the imac on ebay and cut your losses. the good news is that macs, unlike pcs, hold their value well and you should get a decent price for the imac.

[Big Fat Octopus]

I use a firewire external hard drive to store non essential files and to back up important ones. This frees up some space on my 80gig drive for more stuff.

At the end of the day, Music, Digital Photography and Video require huge amounts of storage and you cannot expect to keep adding and store everything on the one drive. You either need to get more drive space or start deleting stuff you dont really need.

My 80gig drive has:

7.5gig Music
27.0gig Movies
20.0gig Photos
6.5gig Applications
5.0gig documents
and the rest is taken up with system software......

I have 3.6gig left!

Another solution you could consider is to buy an old G4 Powermac (350 to 500mhz) off eBay and use it as a file server for backing up and storing your stuff. That's what I'm doing rather than buying more external Firewire drives.

[godsteknon]

Thank you all very much! I think I am getting a handle on what I need to do, but I have one more dumb question---Can you store and run applications from an external hard drive? For example, could we put Final Cut Express onto the external hard drive and work from that drive instead of having to switch it over to our internal hard drive and swaping the location of some other application to the external drive when we wanted to use Final Cut Express? Thanks again!!!

[turtle777]

Yes, in general, you can copy and run applications from an external FW device.
In most cases, it doesn't break any functionality. With some of the iApps, I think there might be a problem, because it assumes that the data (like iPhoto pics and iTunes mp3s) are saved on the same drive.

The question is: why would you want to put FCP on the external drive, but keep the system on the internal drive ?

What I would recommend: do a clean install of OS X on the external drive and install FCP on it as well. Use this OS X only for video editing, don't install any other bells and whistles in this OS X copy.

You can choose where to boot from by pressing the option key while starting up the system, or by selecting the boot system in the preference panes.

-t

[Skip Breakfast]

How do we solve this seemingly never ending spending spree?

Research, planning, and budgeting. Computers are a lot like homes. There are expenses which are generally not though of at the time of purchase...